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Green Building Conference a Huge Success
Feb 24, 2010
Wildsight’s partners on this project included the City of Kimberley, the College of the Rockies, and the Kootenay Rockies Innovation Council. The conference opener was a Friday night event entitled ‘Onstage at McKim – Talking About Green Building’, which featured a panel discussion by some of the leading thinkers in the field, both in person (Tang Lee and host Paula Gordon), as well as ‘live via the web’ (David Eisenberg, Stuart Cowan and Sarah Susanka). The event was attended by over 250 people, and the response was overwhelmingly positive, as both the calibre of speakers and the content was informative and inspirational.
Saturday saw the College hosting 10 individual workshops throughout the day on topics ranging from Green Energy Systems, Green Materials, and Green Renovation Design to Green Communities. Registration for these workshops was offered either as a full conference package (75 registrants), or for individual workshops (40 registrants). Workshops were led by knowledgeable instructors from the local region, as well as from further afield – Calgary and Vancouver, and were full to capacity. Again, the feedback was very positive, with Tang Lee’s workshop being so popular that plans are underway for him to return to Kimberley in June to do a full day workshop.
Running concurrently with workshops on Saturday afternoon, was the ‘Green Building Showcase’ which featured 22 exhibitors from Golden, Invermere, Fernie, as well as the Kimberley/Cranbrook region displaying their green building products and services. The showcase was very well attended by both conference participants and the general public, with attendance over the five hours estimated at more than 300.
As an added component of the conference, Wildsight, the City of Kimberley, and the Kimberley Affordable Housing Committee worked together to promote a design competition, Green and Affordable Homes for Kimberley. Funding from the Columbia Basin Trust provided support for organizing the competition. The City of Kimberley provided $1000.00 in prize money to the winner of the contest, along with the possible opportunity to build. Details on the winning project will be announced soon.
